Clash of victimhoods: the Volhynia Massacre in Polish and Ukrainian memory

As we become increasingly aware of the tragic past, how can we avoid fuelling resentment along national lines in the present?

July 2016: President Petro Poroshenko kneels before the monument to the victims of Volyn tragedy. Source: President of Ukraine.Volhynia,
a border region in the northwest of present-day Ukraine, is almost completely
absent on Europe’s landscape of memory. Here, in 1943, a section of Ukraine’s
nationalist underground massacred the region’s Polish population. These events,
despite being one of the largest mass killings of the Second World War, are
barely known in Ukraine today. Across the border, though, “Wołyn 1943”,
as the events are known, is gradually moving to the very centre of Poland’s
memorial culture, and is playing a significant role in Polish attitudes towards
Ukraine.

I have been active in discussions of Volhynia
in both Poland and Ukraine since the mid-2000s. While expressing my views
I have often had an uncomfortable feeling of being presented (and perceived) as
“a Ukrainian voice”, though I am not at all interested in defending or
denouncing any national tradition. Instead, I believe it is crucial to consider
how researchers can move beyond the predictable logic of two “national truths”
and negotiating the best diplomatic formula to define what happened in Volhynia.

Instead,
we should ask two questions: i) How can we study the events in Volhynia in their
local complexity as well as the comparative transnational framework? [1] ii) What
can we learn from research on the Volhynian massacre not in terms of national
martyrdom, but in terms of individuals’ behaviour in an extremely violent and
dynamic situation when one’s ethnicity (ascribed or self-identified) leads to
collective responsibility and, therefore, life or death?

What happened in Volhynia in 1943?

Located in the northeast of pre-war Poland, Volhynia was an
agricultural region with 2.1m people, with three major ethnic groups:
Ukrainians (almost 68%), Poles (16.5%) and Jews (9.78%). [2]

In 1939, the region was occupied by the Soviet troops, in 1941 – by
the German Wehrmacht. Soon afterwards the Volhynian Jews became the victims of Germany’s
“Final Solution”. After the battle of Stalingrad in 1943, which made the Third
Reich’s defeat and the re-ordering of borders in Europe pretty much
predictable, the Bandera wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN-B) and part of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) nationalist underground
decided to “clean out the Polish element” to make sure that Volhynia would not
remain part of Poland. It is possible that the OUN-B leaders followed the
experience of the First World War when post-war borders were mostly drawn
according to the “national composition of the population”. [3]

In other words, the “anti-Polish operation” of the UPA was based on
the nationalist logic to claim rights to land on the basis of ethnic purity and
additionally inspired by the anti-Polish sentiments and experience of
discriminatory politics of the interwar Polish state where people of Ukrainian
origin had reasons to feel themselves “second-class citizens”. [4]

The model village of Janowa Dolina in Volhynia, pictured here in the 1930s, was the site of a UPA massacre in April 1943. Wikimedia Commons. Fair use.In order to portray the pre-planned ethnic cleansing as a spontaneous
peasant riot, the UPA units killed the Polish civilians with axes, rather than
firearms, and tried to mobilise local Ukrainian peasants to assist in their
actions. The brutality of killings, which made no exception for women or children,
and involved torturing victims and the destruction of Catholic churches, is usually stressed in survivors’ stories.

Historians estimate around 60,000 victims among Volhynia’s Polish
civilians, the majority of them – peasants. [5] The UPA’s “anti-Polish
operation” was probably influenced by the earlier “anti-Jewish operation” carried
out by the Nazis and sometimes even resembled it. One of the UPA documents
clearly stated: “The resistance of the Polish self-defense diminished to an
extent that the Ukrainian operations recall German actions against the Jews”. [6]

Wołyn 1943 is an important touchstone for public memory in Poland

The German administration in Volhynia never seriously tried to stop
the ethnic cleansing against its Polish residents. The Polish underground Armia
Krajowa (AK), which was subordinate to the Polish government in exile, only
later started the so-called “revenge-preventive operations” directed against
Ukrainian villagers. Around 10,000 Ukrainian civilians were killed as a result. [7]

One should note a clear quantitative difference in the numbers of
victims. Polish historians estimate the general amount of the Polish victims of
the UPA at around 100,000 (this number also includes the victims of the
“anti-Polish operation” in East Galicia which caused less mortalities than in
Volhynia). According to the leading researcher of the topic, Grzegorz Motyka,
even the most critical assessment of the Polish operations against Ukrainian
civilians should not equate them with the planned extermination of the Poles in
Volhynia and East Galicia. [8]

Wołyn on Poland’s landscape of memory

Polish memory of the Second World War consists of number of realms, or
lieu de mémoire. Among the most important are the destruction of
the Polish state by joint German-Soviet aggression in September 1939, the Katyń
massacre of captured Polish officers perpetrated by the Soviet state in spring
1940, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising brutally suppressed by German troops and not
supported by the Red Army.

All of these deal with national martyrdom. The broad public discussion
provoked by Jan Gross’s book Neighbours in
2000 strived to add a very different place of memory to the list – the town of
Jedwabne, where in July 1941 a group of Polish town-dwellers murdered their
Jewish co-citizens. The story of Jedwabne portrayed Poles as perpetrators rather
than victims, resulting in heated debates in the media about the “pedagogy of
sorrow”.

As should be expected, Wołyn 1943 is an important touchstone for
public memory in Poland. But its peculiarity stems from the fact that the mass
killings of civilian Poles took place on the territories lying outside the
post-war Polish borders. Those territories are known in Polish national
mythology as Kresy (borderlands, outskirts) — the vast territories in eastern
Europe belonging to the Polish state from the fourteenth to the late eighteenth
centuries and again, in smaller scope, in 1919-1939. This is the “the lost
paradise” of Poland’s “civilisational mission” and, at the same time, the
bloody and romantic clashes with the Cossacks and Tatars. [9]

Radical nationalism, if it doesn’t belong to “us”, is frightening, and if it’s “ours”, appears reasonable and even helpful

As an effect of post-Second World War international agreements, Poland
lost territories in the east (Volhynia and East Galicia became parts of Soviet
Ukraine), but obtained new land in the west (parts of former East Prussia with
the cities of Wrocław, Poznań and Szczecin). In socialist Poland, the topic of
UPA crimes against Poles was broadly presented in books and films, but those
media products focused on the territories of post-war Poland, rather than those
within Soviet Ukraine. Volhynia was absent from the story. The UPA’s
anti-Soviet activities and the history of the AK on Ukrainian territory of
Ukraine were completely ignored, the numbers of victims were not given, and the
role of the Soviet partisans in protecting Polish civilians was exaggerated. [10]

Polish émigré intellectuals contributed
a lot to the re-formulation of Poland’s future “eastern politics”.
In post-war Polish émigré circles,
the Paris-based journal Kultura,
edited by Jerzy Giedroyc, promoted the idea of conscious support for
independence in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus (that is, former Kresy lands),
as well as the rejection of any territorial claims towards neighbouring states,
as essential preconditions for Poland’s political revival.

After 1989, Giedroyc’s vision dominated the foreign policy of
post-socialist Warsaw — Poland was the first state to recognise independent
Ukraine, and since then it has been widely perceived as Ukraine’s advocate in
Europe. This was proven during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the events of
2013–2014 when Polish civil society and political elites showed clear support
to pro-democratic and pro-European protesters.

A photograph from Eaglet Cemetery from the 1920s. Unknown photographer / Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.During the 1990s, Poland’s discussions with Ukraine about history were
dominated by the issue of Eaglet Cemetery (Cmentarz Orląt) — the burial place
of Poles killed during the Ukrainian-Polish clashes of 1918 over the city of
Lwów/Lviv. This cemetery was devastated in the Soviet years and finally
re-opened with the attendance of the presidents of both countries in 2005.

Inside Poland, groups and societies of Kresowianie (often, but not always, descendants of
Poles from the eastern borderlands) raised the Volhynian topic intensively. They were the devoted
promoters of the topic of the Volhynian massacre in terms of national martyrdom
and “neglected genocide”. One of the authors even proposed to call Wołyn 1943 a
“genocidium atrox” (extreme genocide) to stress the exceptional brutality of
killing, which, according to him, “surpass
Soviet and Nazi atrocities”. Another influential rightwing essayist claimed that Ukrainian nationalism “exceeds other
nationalisms (including the Nazi one) in praising killings and unrestrained
apology of brutality”.

The entire Volhynian problem remains rather unknown for many Ukrainians, especially those without family stories from western Ukraine

To maximise these claims, such authors started to apply the
established language of the Holocaust to describe and define what happened to
the Polish civilians of Volhynia. The Polish word “Zagłada”, previously
reserved to define the Nazi extermination of the Jews, began to be used also as
“Zagłada” of the Poles in the Kresy. In the same logic, Ukrainians who helped
their Polish neighbours were called “Righteous of the Kresy” [11] to resemble
the honorific “Righteous among the nations” used by Israel to describe non-Jews
who risked their lives in an attempt to save Jews from the Nazi politics of
extermination.

This “we” language also plays an important role. The far-right weekly Do Rzeczy recently decorated its issue
with a cover referring to Wołyn 1943: “They wanted to kill us all”. In this
phrase, “us” means the Poles, and “they” apparently refers to Ukrainians.

Wołyn 1943 on Ukraine’s landscape of memory

Post-Soviet Ukraine faced the coexistence, competition and, sometimes,
coercion of two narratives on the Second World War — the Soviet and the
nationalist. The first one stresses Ukraine’s role in the Soviet Union’s
struggle against fascism and portrays the UPA as Nazi collaborators. The second
emphasises the anti-Soviet struggle of the UPA that lasted until the early
1950s and caused serious Soviet repressions in western Ukraine.

None of the two pays special attention to the Volhynian massacre.
Wołyn 1943 was not present in Soviet school history textbooks, and even though
Stepan Bandera was one of the main Soviet anti-heroes, the biggest crime of the
OUN-B — the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population of Volhynia — was barely
mentioned. The entire Volhynian problem remains rather unknown for many
Ukrainians, especially those without family stories from
western Ukraine.

The majority of both Polish and Ukrainian texts about the Volhynian massacre remind me of monologues in a different contexts

In Ukraine’s nationalist narrative, Wołyn 1943 was ignored, neglected
or at least downplayed. Writers allied with the OUN-B agenda invented the main
strategies of neglect during the 1950s and 1960s. They described anti-Polish
actions in Volhynia as a spontaneous peasant revolution against Polish rule,
referring to the “right of the oppressed to protect themselves”. They claimed
that violent clashes were provoked by the Germans and/or Soviet partisans. Cynically,
they alleged that the Polish civilians in Volhynia were the victims of the
“irresponsible policies of the Polish government in exile which adhered to the
pre-war borders of Poland”. [12] Additional arguments included the systematic
attempt to equate the UPA anti-Polish and the AK anti-Ukrainian operations
under the “The Volhynian tragedy” umbrella, and to downplay the responsibility
of concrete OUN-B and UPA commanders. [13]

The main goal behind all these manoeuvres is to preserve the UPA as
one of the national symbols of Ukraine’s struggle for independence. It is
telling that even critical Ukrainian essayists tend
to stress that
“the recognition of the responsibility of the perpetrators of the Volhynian
massacre does not automatically mean the condemnation of the entire Ukrainian
underground”, and claim that both UPA and AK committed crimes against
civilians, but none of the armies could be called criminal in itself. Some
authors agree to call the killings a genocide, albeit a “bilateral
genocide” in which, even though the numbers of people
killed were different, the intent of the perpetrators was eventually the same.

Stamps issued in honour of Stepan Bandera in 2009 under Viktor Yushchenko's presidency. Image courtesy of the author.On the political level, the Ukrainian state showed very little
understanding and an evident lack of empathy towards the importance of Wołyn
1943for Polish society. In 2003, on
the 60th anniversary of the massacre, president Leonid Kuchma
strongly insisted that Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada approve the joint appeal by the
parliaments of Ukraine and Poland on the memory of all the victims of
Polish-Ukrainian conflicts during the Second World War. [14] At the same time,
Kuchma took no measures that would give Volyn a wider social forum in Ukraine.
According to sociological surveys, in 2003, 48.9% of people surveyed in Ukraine
knew nothing about the Volhynian massacres of 1943, and there was no
adequate information about them in textbooks. [15]

In 2010, Viktor Yushchenko, Kuchma’s successor, did not consider the
Polish reaction at all when he awarded Bandera the status of “Hero of Ukraine”.
In July 2013, president Viktor Yanukovych decided not to join Polish president
Bronisław Komorowski for the mourning ceremony on the 70th
anniversary of the Volhynian massacre in Lutsk. In April 2015, right after
Komorowski’s guest speech, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a law that gave the
UPA veterans a special status of “fighters for Ukrainian independence”. A
significant part of the Polish media interpreted it as a sign of disrespect and
lack of Ukraine’s appreciation for the strategic partnership with Poland.

Forgotten genocide?

Nowadays the definition of the Volhynian crime as “genocide” is
strongly promoted in Poland by a number of political forces (mostly, on the
right) and is rather broadly accepted in academic discourse. [16] Clearly, a
responsible answer to the question whether the “anti-Polish operation” of the
UPA was genocide depends on your definition of genocide (from the purely legal
to the sociological). In any case, it is clear that calling a concrete
historical event “genocide” signifies a desire to designate the worst possible
crime and attract attention to its memory.

In 2013, the lower house, dominated at the time by the liberal PO
(Platforma Obywatelska) party, adopted the first political declaration on Wołyn
1943, defining the UPA crimes as “an
ethnic cleansing with signs of genocide”. The head of the Polish senate Bogdan
Borusiewicz stressed than that “we do not talk about the responsibility of
Ukrainians or Ukrainian state, but about the responsibility of the OUN and UPA”. [17]

(c) Alik Keplicz AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Three years later, the Polish parliament returned to the topic. In July 2016, the newly elected Polish parliament with a constitutional majority
from the conservative PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) party adopted a new
declaration on Wołyn 1943that called
it a “genocide” and established the Commemoration Day of its victims on 11
July, the day when the UPA units attacked around 100 Polish villages on
Volhynia. The same declaration expressed gratitude
to those Ukrainians who rescued their Polish neighbours and claimed
“solidarity with present-day Ukraine which fights against foreign aggression
for its territorial integrity”. None of the 442 MPs voted against the
resolution.

In 2013, the Sejm’s resolution was criticised by leading Polish
leftist and liberal intellectuals, who called on parliament to think critically
about the Kresy mythology and understand that “for centuries Poland was a
colonial power and occupier for Ukraine”. [18] In 2016, even some conservative
essayists declared worries about the possible effects of the Sejm’s resolution,
stressing that Poland should avoid paternalistic stance towards Ukraine, and be
aware of “Putin’s
interest in embroiling Poland with Ukraine” and should not allow “tragedies
of the past to define today's politics”.

Ukrainian responses

In 2016, as well as before, the most important initiatives on the
Volhynian topic came from Poland Official Kyiv lost numerous opportunities to
propose a creation of an international (not just bilateral) historical
commission or to initiate the broad archeological research on the places of
mass killings.

President Petro Poroshenko’s important gesture during his July 2016
visit to Warsaw — like Willy Brandt before him, he knelt before the monument to
the victims of the Volhynian massacres — came too late and did not influence
the Sejm’s vote on the “genocide resolution”. The letters of distinguished
Ukrainian politicians and intellectuals focused on the formula “we forgive and
ask for forgiveness” had almost no effect as well. The same could be said about
the previous memorandums with the same formula issued by the Ukrainian
Greek-Catholic and Polish Roman-Catholic churches.

The Sejm’s resolution was interpreted by many Ukrainian politicians
and journalists as an “anti-Ukrainian gesture” [19] adopted in the particularly
unfavourable moment of the military conflict in the Donbas region and conscious
attempts of the Kremlin to use Volhynian topic to further complicate
Polish-Ukrainian relations. At the same moment, despite some very radical
proposals, the Verkhovna Rada in September 2016 expressed its regret about the
decision of its Polish colleagues in a very moderate document which condemned “the one-sided political
assessment of the historical events” and opted for further dialogue.

Late October 2016 saw Ukrainian and Polish parliaments simultaneously
approve “The
Declaration of Memory and Solidarity”, which included words of respect to all the victims of the violent
clashes of the twentieth century and condemnation of the external aggressors of
both countries, most of all, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Could one say that this declaration
denounces or, at least, softens the genocide resolution?
Not exactly. And it
is telling that none of
the mentioned documents acknowledges the responsibility of the OUN-B and UPA
for the mass killings of Polish civilians or questioned attempts to
unconditionally heroicise those formations in present-day Ukraine.

Teleological Wołyn

In Poland, there are numerous monuments to the victims of the Volhynian.
The first memorial in the capital city of Warsaw was opened in 1993 — a purely
military symbol (a giant sword) to the soldiers of the 27th
Volhynian AK Infantry Division was erected pretty far away from the city
centre.

In 2003, this monument was supplemented with a new element: 12 stone-made
Volhynian candles, which were meant to symbolise the 12 administrative units of
the Volhynian region where the killings happened. In 2013, a new memorial was
added: a seven metre high cross with an armless Christ. Zuzanna Bogumił argues
that the sculpture of the armless Christ clearly places the entire memorial in
the tradition of Polish religious messianism and martyrology. [20] Exactly by
representing the killings as Christ-like sufferings, the Poles of Volhynia are
made into innocent martyrs who died in the name of the highest national values.
Their moral purity and physical sufferings are connected to the old Romantic
notion of Poland as “a Christ among nations”.

In this mythological framework, Wołyn 1943 became much more than just
an exceptionally tragic historical event, but a collective experience that
bares an eternal truth about the Polish nation. It also recalls and
re-activates the Kresy mythology in full strength together with reinforcement
of the old images of the cruelty of Ukrainian anti-Polish uprisings in the 17th
and 18th centuries.

In 2013, some Polish far-right activists “reconstructed” the Volhynian
massacre in the village of Radymno. Seven wooden houses were burned down before
the eyes of 5,000 spectators, video footage of the “happening” was broadly
broadcasted online. In commenting on the necessity of such “reconstructions”
one of its supporters proudly claimed that “it has to do not just with the
preservation of memory”, but with the rejection of “the
out-of-dated and deeply discredited Giedroyc myth”.

The growth of the “extreme genocide” topic in Poland and development of various “defensive” explanatory schemes in Ukraine seems to be not just a local phenomenon, but an illustration of much broader tendency

Has the intensification of Wołyn 1943 debates influence the attitude
towards the almost one million Ukrainians who live and work in Poland? Polish Prime minister Beata Szydło in January 2016 argued at the European
Parliament that Poland could not agree on the EU quotas on refugees because it
has already “accepted
around one million Ukrainian migrant workers”. This attempt to confuse
refugees with working migrants is telling, especially keeping in mind that, according
to official data on the ministry’s website, less than 20 Ukrainian citizens obtained
refugee status in Poland last year.

In the city of Przemyśl, which has a long history of Polish-Ukrainian
coexistence, local Polish far right extremists (related to the organisers of
the Volhynian massacre “reconstruction”) attacked
a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic procession to commemorate the soldiers of the
Ukrainian Galician Army who fought in 1920s together with the Polish troops
against the Bolsheviks. In this case, as well as in some other instances, all
Ukrainians and all Ukrainian symbols are inaccurately associated with
“Banderism” and responsibility for the massacres of the Poles. [21]

Histories for home use

The majority of both Polish and Ukrainian texts about the Volhynian
massacre remind me of monologues in a different contexts. The mainstream option in
both cases is to defend “your own national truth”. In this logic, radical
nationalism, if it doesn’t belong to “us”, is frightening, and if it’s “ours”,
appears reasonable and even helpful.

In Ukraine, despite the increase of publications caused by initiatives
in Poland, the Volhynian topic remains rather marginal and does not deeply
affect the Bandera mythologies (see more on this in my previous
essay for Open Democracy). In Poland, however, Volhynia is gradually moving
to the centre of national memorial culture as “newly discovered” and
“repressed” proof of the old truth about Poland’s exceptional martyrdom and
sacrifice.

Self-victimisation (of course, not just in Polish or Ukrainian case)
could turn into the superiority complex and bears a number of risks and dangers
for the group who shares it. Speaking about the Middle East, Yassin Al-Haj
Saleh emphasises that while victimhood narratives are powerful
instruments for “disciplining and unifying a community and justifying its
exceptional aspirations”, they are also “much more conducive to committing
injustices than to resisting them”.

The growth of the “extreme genocide” topic in Poland and development
of various “defensive” explanatory schemes in Ukraine seems to be not just a
local phenomenon, but an illustration of much broader tendency — the spread of
cultural insecurity, ethnic nationalism and superiority complexes that could be
seen in many parts of the world, a world some scholars too hastily described as
“post-national”.

[5] The numbers of
people killed in Volhynia are inevitably approximate. No systematic
archeological and demographic research was done. The lack of written sources
(the majority of people affected by ethnic cleansing were illiterate peasants
who left no diaries or notes) plays role as well. Compare Timothy Snyder, The Causes of
Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943, Past
and Present, no. 179 (May 2003): 197–234.

[7] This approximate
number, supported, for instance, by Grzegorz Motyka, includes Ukrainians killed
in all types of Polish “acts of revenge” on the entire territory of pre-war
Poland during 1943–1947.

[11] The Polish
Institute for National Remembrance has recently published a book about “the
Righteous among Ukrainians who rescued Poles subjected to extermination by the
OUN and UPA” in Polish, English and Ukrainian. See Romuald Niedzielko (ed), The Book of the Righteous of the Eastern
Borderlands, 1939–1945 (Warsaw, 2016).

[12] A telling example
of such logic could be found in the writings of one of the most influential
Ukrainian nationalistic historians: Yaroslav Dashkevych, “…Uchy nelozhnymy ustamy skazaty pravdu”. Istorychna eseїstyka
(Kyiv, 2011).

[13] For elaboration
of such argument see the publications of the current director of the Ukrainian
Institute for National Remembrance: Volodymyr Viatrovych, Druha pol`s`ko-ukraїns`ka vijna, 1942–1947 (Kyiv, 2012) and Za lashtunkamy “Volyni-43”. Nevidoma
pol`s`ko- ukraїns`ka vijna (Kyiv, 2016).

[16] It is hard to
name any Polish historian of the Second World War who would at the moment
disagree with the definition of Volhynian massacre as a “genocide”. Compare the
influential publication from the early 1990s: Ryszard Torzecki, Polacy i Ukraińcy. Sprawa ukraińska w czasie
II wojny światowej na terenie II Rzeczypospolitej (Warszawa, 1993). See
also Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Der polnisch-ukrainische Historikerdiskurs über den polnisch-ukrainischen Konflikt
1943–1947, Jahrbücher
für Geschichte
Osteuropas, vol. 57, no.1 (2009): 54–85.

[19] The worst example here is a project of Ukraine`s parliament
counter-declaration about the “anti-Ukrainian genocide committed by Poland in
1919–1951” proposed
by MP Oleh Musii. Luckily, it was not even discussed at the
parliamentary session/

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